Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi, I've been lurking a bit for a little while and decided to make an account.

After failing to grow a productive garden on my apartment deck for 3 years running, I decided I wanted to try growing things indoors with aquaponics. It took me a while to figure out because I'm terrible at building things, but eventually I managed to figure out the basics.

I'm not done yet, but here is what I've got so far:

- Two 50 litre growbeds, plumbed up with bell siphons.
- A 170 litre tub for my fish.
- A pump.
- A home-brewed LED growlight with 19 3 Watt Star LEDS (one I broke ). 3 Blue, 2 white and the rest are all red mounted on a big aluminium heatsink.

I'm still waiting for an order of hydroton to arrive, which is the last big thing I need.

I'm going to probably use goldfish instead of tilapia, because I've got no clue where to find tilapia where I live. I'm going to try to grow some Kale, Tomatoes and bell peppers in it.

Here are some pictures I took of my setup so far:

My system with my grow lights turned on:


A little closer:


I built my own growlight out of 3W leds:


The system as a whole without the leds turned on.


The plumbing:


The bell part of the bellsiphon:


The standpipe part of the bellsiphon:



Hopefully it all works out.

Welcome Levi! Sorry about disapproving the other post you had made, I did not see this one yet. It is quite the disco you have there!

Those grow lights made me think of some, ahem, naughty places in Bangkok.

It looks sound enough Levi, but you only need a few fish with the small filtration (grow beds) available.

Yeah, the lights were a bit more intense than I was expecting when putting them together, haha.

I was thinking of putting one sacrificial goldfish in there to start my system, and then once its running and plants are growing maybe upping it to 3 goldfish. I'm a little new to this so the ratios and such are a bit tricky.

Okay, I got my growbed media and cleaned it and started the whole thing up and it seems to be working. My only concern in that the water level goes a bit higher than I expected(within a hydroton pebble or two of the surface). Is that likely to cause problems for the plants?